My longtime friend Bob Whipple is a corporate consultant (and ace musician) who specializes in an often overlooked cornerstone of productivity, success, and satisfaction: trust. In his role as “The Trust Ambassador,” Bob makes a point of keeping up with research on his topic. If trust doesn’t sound to you like a topic that calls for much research, take a moment to think about our federal government, or international diplomacy, or how the TSA has changed air travel. Think about closed-circuit TV cameras, e-mail phishing, Internet passwords and retinal scans. Think about this photo, which I recently received from another friend, unfortunately with no source ID.

So I’m grateful to experts like Bob, even when he’s the bearer of bad news.His e-mail last week was full of disturbing data and observations. Here are his musings about recent trust research, reprinted by permission, with a link to the findings he cites. (Just one chart is reproduced here, since although the Edelman site enables sharing, the material is copyrighted.)

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Every year at the end of January, Richard Edelman puts out his “Trust Barometer” which is a huge study of trust in 28 countries around the world. The actual report is something like 70 pages of data.

This year, as I read the comparison of trust in the different countries, I was hoping an oxygen mask would come down so I could breathe. There are hundreds of interesting and some very frightening statistics as you review the data. I will be sharing the information with my leadership class because trust is the most important part of leadership (IMHO).

[Edelman’s findings] show trust in 28 different countries as measured at the start of 2017 (end of 2016) and the start of 2018 (end of 2017). [If you compare] data from “Informed publics” . . . with the entire population, including uneducated people, . . . you can see the incredible drop in trust that occurred in the year 2017 in the USA. It was by far the greatest decline in any country they have ever measured in the history of Edelman’s work for the past 17 years. (Incidentally, the numbers given are a combination of trust in Business, trust in Government, trust in NGOs, and trust in the Media.)

It is interesting to note that while trust declined in all four categories they measure in the USA, in China trust went up in all four categories. Here is the data for the number of percentage points lost or gained in the USA and China for 2017. As you read, keep in mind that changes in trust (up or down) of less than 5 points are routine and not worthy of explanation, but changes above 5 points have a specific cause that should be identified. Changes in the double digits are very rare and indicative of something major going on.

Business – USA lost 10 points while China gained 7 points

Government – USA lost 14 points while China gained 8 points

NGOs – USA lost 9 points while China gained 5 points

Media – USA lost 5 points while China gained 6 points

For informed publics, the USA was 6th from the top rated country out of 28 countries at the end of 2016. (The actual survey was taken from October 13 to November 16, 2016.) By the end of 2017 we have fallen to dead last in the world (normally Russia and Poland duke it out for the lowest trust country) and China is the highest rated country in the world for trust.

I am still trying to fathom the magnitude of the changes. I have been studying the Edelman data each year for the past dozen years. Every February I spend about 20 hours drinking in the data and updating my presentations on trust and leadership. This year, within the first 20 minutes it was obvious that we are living in a very different country now than we did in 2016.

So my friends, we still have much work to be done and some interesting times ahead as a nation. My best description to one of my cronies is that it feels like a toboggan ride down a mogul-infested slope blindfolded.

— Bob Whipple, “The Trust Ambassador” https://thetrustambassador.com/

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Incorporated, an organization dedicated to development of leaders. He speaks on leadership topics and the development of trust in numerous venues. He also teaches leadership and business classes at graduate universities. As a leadership coach and business consultant, he works with individual clients as well as large organizations such as government agencies, corporations, and The Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce. A highly successful leader at a Fortune 500 company for over 30 years, Mr. Whipple accomplished revolutionary change while leading a division of over 2000 people through the application of outstanding “people” skills.

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Did 2017 spit you out feeling demoralized, angry, confused, and/or frustrated? Quick, go see Man of La Mancha! Custom Made Theatre’s production of this marvelous show by Dale Wasserman (book), Mitch Leigh (music), and Joe Darion (lyrics) is much more than a nostalgia trip. It’s a rousing cheer for the bright side of humanity: not just love but honor and aspiration.

I had qualms about revisiting a show I’d loved 50 years ago when Richard Kiley first rode his imaginary Rosinante into New York’s Circle in the Square. When I saw Man of La Mancha again, decades later, at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, a thunder and lightning storm lit up the climax. Could a small local company do justice to a picaresque full-size musical on a stage the size of a San Francisco apartment, broken up by wooden beams, with the actors playing all the instruments?

Yes. Custom Made’s staging is a surprisingly good fit for this play-within-a-play set in a Spanish prison, where the Inquisition is breathing down Miguel de Cervantes’ neck and his manuscript for “Don Quixote” is a hostage. On the last preview night, the house was full, and so were our hearts. We laughed, we cried, and I can’t have been the only one itching to sing along with long-forgotten gems like “Little Bird” and “Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” as well as the now-legendary “Impossible Dream.”

OK, the production is a bit rustic. Not every supporting actor is excellent, although each of them excels at something. But Edward Hightower was born to play Cervantes/Quixote — swelling each moment with drama, pivoting in a breath from the mad old knight to his pragmatic creator. As the innkeeper, Anthony Aranda also is outstanding, and Rachael Richman makes a convincing Dulcinea. Best of all is the show itself: an inspiring, energizing reminder that human civilization has been stumbling over itself at least since Cervantes wrote this pioneering novel 400 years ago.

Life is not about winners and losers, Man of La Mancha reminds us. It’s about being true to our bravest, most generous selves:

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause.

Read about, or buy tickets to, Custom Made’s production here — running now through Feb. 17 at the Shelton Theater.

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Unlike Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey ignored the rules of golden-age British crime fiction—with brilliant results. But 60 years after her death, the greatest mystery Tey created still may be herself.

I loved all the golden-age writers in my teens and twenties, and I still do. What particularly drew me to Josephine Tey — who was also the popular British playwright Gordon Daviot, both of whom began life as a Scot named Elizabeth MacKintosh — was the diversity of her novels. For Tey, mysteries weren’t an end but a means. Like the sonnet, the mystery form offered a structure within which a writer of wide-ranging curiosity could explore and experiment.

Perfect! I wrote sonnets (and other poetry), and I wrote plays. I avidly read horse stories, magic and fantasy, international adventure, and science. I played basketball, softball, and field hockey; I was a champion broad-jumper and short-distance runner. Like Josephine Tey, I fiercely resisted any pressure to narrow my focus. I still do.

Francis Wheen writes:

[Tey’s] disdain for formulaic fiction is confirmed in the opening chapter of The Daughter of Time (1951). In a hospital recuperating from a broken leg, Detective Inspector Alan Grant despairs of the books on his bedside table, among them a writing-by-numbers mystery called The Case of the Missing Tin-Opener. “Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then?” he wonders despairingly.

Was everyone nowadays thirled [enslaved] to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about “a new Silas Weekley” or “a new Lavinia Fitch” exactly as they talked about “a new brick” or “a new hairbrush.” They never said “a new book by” whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.

Still true today (are you listening, James Patterson and Lee Child?), but this is not a charge that could ever be made against Josephine Tey. In The Franchise Affair (1948) she can’t even be bothered to include the obligatory murder: all we have is a teenage girl who claims that two women kidnapped her for no apparent reason, and we know almost from the outset that she is lying.

What a 21st-century writer must contend with, unlike Tey, is a flooded book-publishing market in a culture that’s shifted its focus to television, film, audio, and other content-delivery modes. Commercial publishers rarely consider new authors at all these days, even in genre fiction, but they shrink in horror from a genre fiction book that’s not part of a series. It’s all about marketing. The looming mystery in the publishing world is how to forge that crucial (and preferably lasting) connection between books and readers. And among the core assumptions is that readers’ interest is “not in the book but in its newness” — the same author writing the same kind of story as last time, but with some different characters and a twist in the plot.

Can anyone nowadays work successfully in both fiction and playwriting? Or does marketing pressure oblige authors to pick one path and stick with it? Is this the same question museums answered decades ago when “cabinets of curiosities” morphed into organized sets of collections? Is it a question that’s currently shackling bright young people to a professional specialty as early as middle school?

As for Josephine Tey, reading Francis Wheen’s inquiry reignited my desire to see a play by Gordon Daviot. Until then, I’m looking forward to rereading Tey’s mystery novels. I’m also cautiously curious about Nicola Upson’s series in which Josephine Tey is a character . . . and the biography that was still just a gleam on the horizon when Vanity Fair published this fascinating account of that vanishing golden-age renaissance woman, Josephine Tey AKA Gordon Daviot AKA Elizabeth MacKintosh.

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For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

That line from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians has always haunted me. I can vividly remember lying awake when I was young, wrestling with my brain to know more: Who am I? What am I doing here? and What is God?

Now that I’m at the other end of life, I understand a truth I’ve learned from science as well as from just plain living. Human understanding is limited by human physiology. What a piece of work is a man, said Shakespeare, and it’s true. But what a piece of work is a dog’s nose. A mosquito’s flight. A whale’s sonar. We know in part, because part of existence is all that our human senses can detect, and our human brains can process. They’ve evolved to cope with the fraction of reality that’s essential to our survival.

We feel like we know and understand the world. But in fact, we live in metaphors. In fact, the sun and moon are not the same size, and stars are not candles in the sky, and a piece of wood isn’t solid. It’s mostly space, dotted with atoms flying faster than a mosquito. We treat it as solid because that’s how we perceive it, and because we have a practical need for it to be solid, as furniture or fuel or whatever.

As the world has become more global, I’ve been trying to be aware how different people’s metaphors are, according to the person, and even more, the culture. Westerners think villagers in country X are backward because they believe diseases are caused by demons, whereas we know they’re caused by germs. The villagers think we’re backward because we’re always washing our hands, when we should be praying or casting a spell. What matters more? If a metaphor is true, or if it works?

I spent Thanksgiving week in London and Barcelona. London is gearing up for Brexit, to leave the European Union, and Barcelona’s preparing for an election following the recent vote for their province of Catalunya to secede from Spain. I worried it would be crazy over there, maybe dangerous. But after the US, I felt like I’d left a place of chaotic insanity for a healthy safe atmosphere that I used to define as normal.

But my chaotic insanity is some people’s normal. Apparently there are American citizens who felt as threatened by President Barack Obama, or almost-President Hillary Clinton, as I feel by the current occupant of the White House, who to me is so threatening that I can’t call him the president of my country. I watch him gleefully dismantle economic recovery measures, and environmental protections, and just about every strand in the social safety net, and I see a crazy dangerous man who is deeply hostile to the values of community and justice that for me define my country. My expat friends in England told me that most of the world sees him, not me, as an accurate representation of my country: it’s not about community and justice, but warfare and profit, oppression and exploitation.

And I look at my cat, fighting the imaginary mice under the living room rug; and I wonder: Are they imaginary? Maybe in her metaphor, she’s keeping me safe from deadly demons.

So here we are, preparing to celebrate Christmas. The birthday of a man we know was not born on Dec. 25, whose coming was probably not announced by a new star, whose humble manger was not surrounded by adoring cows, donkeys, shepherds, and wise men, much less by falling snow; whose mother was probably not a virgin, nor visited by an angel. We celebrate a metaphor. You could say Christianity has perceptively linked the values of Jesus, from rebirth to nonviolent resistance and love, with the winter solstice, when the sun turns back in its path across the heavens, and daylight stops getting shorter, and we can trust that warmth will soon return, and lakes will thaw, and crops will grow, and life will be safer again.

I still hope that someday I will know and understand a larger reality than this. But right now my job is to be human, and I have to live by a metaphor, not a full knowledge of truth. And since this metaphor is incomplete, I cherish the values we celebrate at Christmas: the brave generosity, the community, and the commitment to justice which offer our best hope of keeping us, and life, and our world, safe and healthy.

Meditation for the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, San Francisco, December 10, 2017

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The dashboard announcement is startling and terse. The explanation is corporate-ambiguous:

Two years ago Pronoun set out to create a one-of-a-kind publishing tool that truly put authors first. We believed that the power of data could be harnessed for smarter book publishing, leveling the playing field for indie authors.

That’s an allusion to Pronoun’s launch 2 years ago as a rebirth of Vook, an early cutting-edge multimedia e-book platform whose greatest asset turned out to be its data innovations. As Publishing Perspectives reports:

“Vook specialized in combining electronic elements for storytelling such as video and social-media links with text. In 2014, Vook also developed a sales-tracking revenue dashboard for authors called AuthorControl, and was said at the time to be supplying book-publishing software services to several news-media corporations.”

In May 2015 Pronoun arose from Vook’s ashes, after the latter’s acquisition of “Booklr (a data analysis service for e-book sales founded by Brody), Byliner (a literary e-book publisher), and Coliloquy (a choose-your-own-adventure platform using enhanced e-books and apps).”

When Macmillan bought Pronoun a year later, the consensus was that they were after these data assets more than the stylish e-books Pronoun was producing. Although the connection to a major publisher may have been a carrot for aspiring authors, it did not propel them into any lucrative contracts with their new parent.

Pronoun’s obituary claims: “We are proud of the product we built, but even more so, we’re grateful for the community of authors that made it grow. Your feedback shaped Pronoun’s development, and together we changed the way authors connect with readers.”

Publishing Perspectives adds:The statement doesn’t elaborate on how Pronoun is deemed to have “changed the way authors connect with readers.” And its message is sobering: “Unfortunately, Pronoun’s story ends here.” [It] avoids any clear explanation of why the [sic] Pronoun is being shut down. “While many challenges in indie publishing remain unsolved,” the statement reads, “Macmillan is unable to continue Pronoun’s operation in its current form. Every option was considered before making the very difficult decision to end the business.”

So far, the analyses I’ve seen agree that what doomed Pronoun was its start-up policy of free services to authors. That changed in 2017; 100% royalties to the author became a sliding scale starting at 65%. Not enough, evidently.

We’ll probably learn more in the days ahead about whatever financial losses, fears, or moving of the goalposts prompted Macmillan to pull the plug. My own diagnosis is that, in various ways, Pronoun’s reach didn’t match its grasp. For instance: despite its author-centric rhetoric, the only way to ask a question or solve a problem was by e-mail; I often fumed at having to wait a day or two for a reply from Elissa Bernstein, Author Happiness Advocate (a higher bar than one rep could hope to meet). Pronoun did pioneer in offering useful analyses and guidelines on keywords and categories. Its publishing process was straightforward, easy, and quick. As an aggregator, it distributed e-books to the 5 outlets I most wanted to reach: Amazon, iBooks, Google Play, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. On the other hand, Pronoun’s 6 book-design templates — The Shelley, The Austen, The Didion, The Lamott, The Sandberg, and The Rowling — didn’t fit their titles, but ran a visually narrower, stuffier gamut.

Of course it makes sense for an e-book publisher to aim to be all things to all people. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing hits that mark with a brisk, bland breeziness. Pronoun chose to shoot for a cutesy specificity of tone — Valley Girl meets Lizzie Bennet — and gambits like The Verb, a chatty dashboard-topping distraction with heads such as “Are You a Pantser or a Plotter?” that to me felt more patronizing than professional. Still, they did move the needle toward authors as the core of publishing, a valuable nudge to the industry. I’m sorry to see Pronoun go. I’m sorry to see one more hole blasted in the hull of that noble frigate, the book.

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Lately the pile on my bedside table is so tall it’s toppling, and even my tablet can’t remember what e-book I was halfway through. As the SF Public Library’s annual Fall Big Book Sale looms, it’s time to winnow . . . and wonder what tips the scale from “keep reading” to “let it go.” Here are a couple of books I liked but just didn’t finish.

I love plots, and this limpid lucid book has none. It’s fascinating if you’re in a mood to slow life’s hectic pace to a crawl and let your gaze linger over long stretches of Southwestern landscape, traveling by mule or foot with two French clerics dispatched to secure Catholicism’s grip on pre-U.S. New Mexico. I enjoyed as much of it as I read, but didn’t find it compelling enough to look forward to at day’s end. Tipping point: my old copy is literally falling to pieces.

A charming, compelling voice gets this novel off to a zippy start. Once under way, though, I began to suspect that her narrator’s voice and a few plot ideas were all Dianne Day had planned. In 1905, rebellious bluestocking Caroline Fremont Jones flees Boston for San Francisco, drops “Caroline,” and sets up as a typist. Excellent premise! However . . . Another reviewer has compared Day to Sue Grafton; I agree in that both authors meander and vamp, as if they’re not sure which way to steer their narrators. Fremont Jones vacillates much more than Kinsey Millhone: sometimes she’s a take-charge amateur detective, sometimes a rather limp romantic heroine, sometimes a bystander in a Poe tale. The pre-quake San Francisco setting is dotted with just enough anachronisms to put me off (“mom and dad”? no formalities between ladies and gentlemen? and the big sex scene is a Harlequin classic); and by midway through the story, suspense–alas!–had dissipated.

This book is well written and fast paced enough to keep me reading (a freebie from BookBub) while I traveled. But once I stopped, I realized I wasn’t learning anything from these characters or this story, and I haven’t picked it up again. Too many mysteries and thrillers out there — too little reading time!

Thanks to Authors’ Marketing Club and Book Funnel, you can get a free e-copy of ZAPPED: An Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery (while supplies last). Here’s the deal: Click this link, download and read the book, then write an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads. Short or long, it doesn’t matter. But start the wheels turning now — the freebies are almost gone.

Enjoy!

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From November 20, 1969, to June 11, 1971, the island of Alcatraz was occupied by San Francisco Bay Area Indians who claimed it by right of discovery. (See Taking Alcatraz, Part 1.) When the California Historical Society hosted a showing of John Ferry and Grace De Soto’s film Taking Alcatraz on June 15, 2017, it also hosted a reunion. The second half of this collaboration between CHS and the New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) was a panel discussion of occupiers and supporters. As hugs, handshakes, and a few teary eyes testified, some of them hadn’t seen each other in decades.

Stories emerged at CHS that were news to many of us in the overflow audience. Filmmakers Ferry and DeSoto and photographer Hartmann reconstructed the occupation, and the events that led up to it and followed it, in a series of interviews with spearhead Adam Fortunate Eagle and other participants. Hartmann’s extensive photographs are on view at NUMU (see also www.ilkahartmann.com). As described in my previous post, the occupation built from a small group of Sioux, to a larger multitribal group formed in response to a judge’s rejection of their original claim, to a 19-month live-in force of 79. That number fluctuated over time. Opponents claimed that commitment gradually dwindled. As the occupiers recalled it, reality intervened: commitment remained strong, but students had to go back to school, and other responsibilities called people away.

images from http://burymyart.tumblr.com/post/103187682673/native-american-activists-occupy-alcatraz-island

The U.S. government, mainly in the form of the Coast Guard, struggled from the start to remove the Indians from the island. Water, electricity, and phone service were cut off. So the occupiers lived in the guards’ quarters, where they had water and a generator. Food was ferried over by a crew of supporters, which grew along with popular awareness and support. Herb Caen ran regular updates; Creedence Clearwater Revival donated a boat. One skipper and panelist, Mary Crowley, was part of the original fleet that had transported the Indians to the island under cover of night, without lights.

Panelist Alan Harrison, a tribal member of the Robinson Rancheria, California “Pomo” Native American tribe on the banks of Clear Lake in Lake County, was one of the youngest occupiers at age eight or nine. His memories included playing with the toys donated by Mattel. Even younger was baby Wovoca Trudell, named for a Paiute religious leader, delivered on “liberated land” by Dr. Larry Brilliant when expectant mother Lou Trudell refused to leave.

Panelist Eloy Martinez, involved from the outset, recalled sailing over with the second party of occupiers and living on the island for seven months. He remained involved in civil rights, working with Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, among others. Actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather could only join the occupation on weekends. She’d been studying with Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto on The Lone Ranger TV series and ran the Indian Actors’ Studio.

“Everything about it felt right,” Mary Crowley summarized. “It was a peaceful, positive action. . . . A lot of good came from Alcatraz.”

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The Summer of Love and Monterey Pop aren’t the only anniversaries San Francisco is celebrating. Last night a standing-room-only crowd at the California Historical Society had the rare treat of watching John and Grace De Soto Ferry’s 2015 film Taking Alcatraz, followed by some riveting personal recollections from the filmmakers and the participants.

Around 50 years ago, as Adam Fortunate Eagle tells it onscreen, the Bay Area’s diverse Native Americans yearned for a stronger sense of heritage than they and their children were getting from assimilation. Spurred partly by the Civil Rights movement, partly by the U.S. government’s neglect of its treaty obligations, they started working more and more collectively. When a local Indian center was destroyed by fire, and the feds declared Alcatraz Island and its abandoned prison to be surplus property, they remembered the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) between the U.S. and the Sioux. That treaty returned to Native peoples all retired, abandoned and out-of use federal lands.

First a few Sioux took a boat out, swam to shore, and claimed the island. The feds contended that if any Indians had any right to Alcatraz, it wasn’t the Sioux. So the next foray included members of more tribes. This time the claimants issued a proclamation:

We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery. We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty: We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for 24 dollars in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for these sixteen acres is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we know that land values have risen over the years.…

On November 20, 1969, 79 Native Americans began a 19-month occupation of Alcatraz. They wound up living mainly in the guards’ quarters, after water and electricity were cut off to the other buildings. Creedence Clearwater Revival donated a boat; individuals and restaurants donated food. Dr. Larry Brilliant, who offered medical assistance, delivered a baby for John and Lou Trudell when Lou insisted their child be born on liberated Native American land. Herb Caen used his popular column in the Chronicle to keep San Franciscans informed. When he polled support for the occupation vs. the Coast Guard’s persistent attempts to end it, the occupiers won 80 to 20.

The government’s antagonistic response seems to have been softened by Vietnam-beleaguered President Richard Nixon. He halted the objectionable federal policy of removing (by carrot and/or stick) Indians from their reservations to eight designated cities, and met enough of the occupiers’ other terms that they agreed to leave the island. Although some accounts state that they were forcibly removed, participant Sacheen Littlefeather and other speakers at the June 15 joint presentation by CHS and New Museum Los Gatos saw it differently. They accepted a swap: Alcatraz (which suddenly was no longer surplus, but a major potential tourist attraction) for 200 acres of land near Davis, CA. There the Native Americans created Deganawidah–Quetzalcoatl University (DQU), a two-year college from which students could go on to complete a four-year degree at UC Davis.

More on this historic turning point coming soon in Part 2.

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